Review #1 Joe Written by Gary Hawkins Directed by David Gordon Green USA, 2013 Despite his early filmography making him a critical favourite and causing film lovers to sing his praises, David Gordon Green’s recent ventures have moved sharply away from such films. The same can be said of Nicolas Cage, who has unfortunately been …
Promoted as a French comedy in the spirit of In The Loop and Veep, Quai d’Orsay is a very enjoyable watch, full of wit and fun. Based on the graphic novel of the same name written by Antonin Baudry (under the pseudonym Abel Lanzac) and based on his own experiences, the film follows a young politico (Raphael Personnaz) navigating his way as a speechwriter for the French foreign minister (Thierry Lhermitte). Nearly blindsided by the hurdles of his new position, Arthur Vlaminck (Personnaz) works through no to little guidance, some in-office saboteurs, and the slamming doors and blown away papers that mark the minister’s coming and going (to the chagrin of the office cat).
Relax, I’m From the Future Written and Directed by Luke Higginson Canada, 2013 Time travel is a concept that has been explored in numerous movies throughout history, with varying results both commercially and critically. While the real-life technology for the endeavour remains a pipe dream, the exploration of its ramifications and effects has yet to …
Thanks to the likes of James Wan, paranormal horror is all the rage. From Paranormal Activity to Insidious and The Conjuring, audiences are irretrievably hooked to tales of nuclear families being bloodlessly menaced by only-fleetingly-visible entities of malicious intent. What’s remarkable about Mike Flanagan’s Oculus, which follows his no-budget wonder Absentia, is how it manages to wring genuine dread from a beyond-worn subgenre simply by paying close attention to the realities of its deeply troubled characters. Oculus functions equally well as a tragic psychodrama as it does a horror film.
Better to have an ungainly surplus of ideas than none at all; that seems to be Richard Ayoade’s philosophy behind The Double, a wild, uneven, but never dull sci-fi black comedy that purports to tackle Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, but is at least as interested in pilfering visual ideas from films gone by while marrying them to Ayoade’s winningly dry comic sensibility.
What separates life on the fringe of society from being outside of society entirely? It’s that line of demarcation that fascinates Kelly Reichardt, whose particularly American take on “slow cinema” collides with our own expectation of the requirements of the thriller genre in Night Moves, which cleverly cloaks its true thematic concerns in familiar story tropes.
How can you dramatize real-life events you were a party to, but don’t fully understand yourself? In the case of Catherine Breillat, you do your very best to communicate the depth of your own lack of comprehension. Surely one of the least vain openly autobiographical films ever made, Abuse of Weakness is repetitive and infuriating – but deliberately so, and to its complement.
Nicole Holofcener is one of the strongest voices working in movies today. Her films, often about the lives of everyday women, are consistently sharp and observant and Enough Said does not stray from her already terrific track record. As a writer she has a way of portraying her characters as people we know or someone that we could know.